President Obama's bid to 'get back in the groove'

In years past, the crowds would flock to see Barack Obama — this summer, it’s Obama who’s looking for a few good crowds.

Obama, a president who gets a lift from supporters outside the Beltway and wilts in the D.C. hothouse, is hitting the road for all the expected second-term reasons: to regain his slipping leverage over Republicans ahead of the looming debt ceiling battle this fall, and to refocus his oft-meandering message back on the economy, which is all voters really care about.

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Yet as much as anything, Obama has embarked on this week’s series of policy speeches to improve his own ambiguous frame of mind and take a comforting spin in the way-back machine, like a veteran chart-topper revisiting smaller, friendlier haunts on a comeback tour.

That approach risks his embodying the Republican caricature of him as a rhetoric addict who schedules a speech anytime he can’t think of anything better to do — but his team is willing to risk the ridicule to change the Obama in decline narrative.

“We want to get back in the groove,” said an Obama aide, describing this week’s menu of three presidential policy addresses. “This is very clearly our attempt to get back in the groove.”

It all kicked off with a loose, one-hour Obama set in the familiar climes of Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., the 2005 site of his first big economic speech as a U.S. senator, with a wide-ranging greatest hits address that offered little new in the way of policy but plenty of applause lines geared at firing up a struggling president and his most committed fans.

“With this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington’s taken its eye off the ball,” the president told an audience, some of which sat behind the podium, in standard Obama ’12 formation, to hear many of the same themes he deployed against Mitt Romney.

“I am here to say this needs to stop. This needs to stop. This moment does not require short-term thinking, and it does not require having the same old stale debates. Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that matter most to you — the people we represent,” he said, to cheers from the crowd.

Obama’s decision to return to a familiar locale as he tries to re-energize his second-term agenda fits a familiar pattern for the president.

“This is a guy with a very strong sense of place. He is going to Galesburg for a reason. He likes getting out of Washington, but to places that a hold a real fondness in his heart,” said veteran Democratic strategist Paul Begala.

“This is what leadership is, you just keep at it until you get a break.”

Aides describe Obama as basically upbeat but restless, eager to try any approach to break the logjam that is threatening to grind his second-term agenda to dust.

But first, they said, he needed to clarify that agenda ahead of what promises to be a groundhog-day autumn of partisan warfare over the debt ceiling and deficits after months of lurching from what one West Wing ally called “Scandal-abra” — the Internal Revenue Service, National Security Agency and Benghazi controversies — to stalled policy pushes like the unsuccessful post-Newtown gun control push and the ongoing bipartisan immigration reform efforts.

At the heart of it all is the very-much unfinished business of securing a still-limp recovery, amid recent polling showing an increasing number of Americans believe the economy is on the wrong track.

“Now, today, five years after the start of that Great Recession, America has fought its way back,” Obama said. “Thanks to the grit and resilience and determination of the American people, of folks like you, we’ve been able to clear away the rubble from the financial crisis. We’ve started to lay a new foundation for stronger, more durable economic growth.”